BOOKS.

THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE.* BRILLIANT as two-thirds of this story are, the whole is not a single work in the sense in which Robert Elsmere was a single work. In Robert Elsmere, the plot really hinged on the atti- tude of various minds towards Christian theology. It was that attitude which gave the story its meaning, its unity, and its denouement. The History of David Grieve, on the other hand, has no such unity. It is a novel of very high imagina- tive power, soldered on very imperfectly to a rather tedious description and analysis of a number of miscellaneous and fragmentary convictions—some of them, we think, truly wise, some of them highly dogmatic and very unwise—which Mrs. Ward has no opportunity and no space to let her hero either explain or defend against the most obvious objections to which they are open. Of course, the " history " of any fictitious hero might be made to contain, as Wilhelm Meister contains, any number of incoherent dissertations on life. Mrs. Ward has more sense of unity than Goethe showed when he published that truly astounding compound of penetrating insight and dreary speculative abstractions. But her third volume too often reminds us of the tedium of the great German's inartistic omniunt gatherum of world-wisdom.

Let us deal first with the novel proper,—the first two. volumes, with such parts of the third as are not strewed with the debris of illuminated rationalism and dogmatic preposses- sions. This constitutes a story of very high imaginative power, though it appears to us that the least satisfactory part of it is the study of the hero himself. Though the power of this story shows on the whole a great advance on that of Robert Elsmere, and though David Grieve is more of a real person to us than Robert Elsmere, there is still something wanting from beginning to end in the individual stamp and visibility of the character. More than in the case of any other characters in the book, we have to reckon together all the items we are told of him, in order to make him out, and then do not succeed in re- cognising the man. We have to remember the tenderness with which, as a little child, he nursed his father (a tenderness which does not show itself, by-the-way, as it might surely have shown itself, to his less prepossessing but far more humble-minded uncle) ; the eager acquisitiveness of his intellect ; his pride and self-conceit; his rather inexplicable sensitiveness to the impressions made by the revivalist meetings (inexplicable, we

• The History of David Grim. By Hrs. Htunphry Ward. 3 Tole. London Smith, Elder, and co. mean, as taken in connection with the moral insensibility both of his boyhood and early manhood) ; his extreme smartness and self-confidence, as a youth, in pushing his own prospects ; his hardness (for a long time) towards his teacher and friend, Mr. Ancrum ; his immeasurable delight in the Voltairian criticism when he first comes across it ; his sudden leap into passion, and the entire freedom from any of the English feeling as to the sacredness of the relation between the sexes which, if there be any truth in the constant reminders of his inherited Puritanism, one might have expected ; his determination to end his misery by suicide, as if he were not in the least personally responsible for the pitiable moral plight in which he finds himself ; and then his gradual recovery under his old friend's care, who, however, never seems to succeed in conveying to his mind what the fall of the will,—what personal sin,—really means. Then comes that marriage "with a light heart" which seems to us one of the least creditable events of his history, considering his own past,--the shipwreck he ha I already made of his youth, and the absence of any deep feeling on his own part towards the girl he marries out of a superficial feeling of gratitude. Yet this is made the turning-point of his career. Mrs. Ward, who preaches the sacredness and perpetuity of the marriage tie with an earnestness that does her great credit, makes this light-hearted marriage to an affectionate but shallow-minded girl who knows nothing of his past, and for whom at the time he cares but little,—Lucy is one of the very cleverest sketches of the book, by-the-way,—the beginning to him of all that is good and great. And subsequently we hear only of his tenderness and magnanimity as a husband and father, of his disinterestedness and public spirit as a capitalist, of his rationalism and transcendental feats in persuading him- self that a Christ who, to the great masses of the Christian world, is disguised in a perfectly false supernaturalism, is still discoverable behind the legendary history by a sufficiently bold and instructed critic. We cannot say that this history of David Grieve gives us the impression of an organic whole. To our mind, the true individuality of the man is wanting. We have to add up mentally his intellectual features to make out what he is intellectually, and even then we fail. Still more do we fail in understanding his moral nature. For example, there is not even the germ of the mature man in the lad who, when first feeling the touch of religious enthusiasm, breaks out on slight provocation into violence, and plunges into intoxication without once fastening upon himself the reproach of obvious and wilful sin; or in the man who, when he has discovered how far he himself has . passed from even his own conception of true life, and how far he has misguided his sister, resolves on self-destruction to save himself from any sincere act of self-humiliation and true penitence. We see the germs of a man who might very well become respectable and benevolent, in David Grieve's childhood and youth, but not the germs of a man who is to become, what Mrs. Ward means him to be, a moral hero, no less than benignant, intelligent, and strong.

But if David Grieve himself is unsatisfactory, Mrs. Hum- phry Ward touches the highest point she has yet reached as an imaginative writer, in the wonderful portraits of his sister and Elise Delaunay. In Robert Elsmere, her greatest achieve- ment was the picture of a perfectly good woman. There is nothing in this book to compare in moral charm with her portrait of Catherine. But for almost antique grandeur of effect she has never before come near her study of Louie, impossible as it is for any one with ordinary experience to verify the truth of such a picture from his own observation. Whether so perfectly selfish a being ever existed, we do not know. But we do know that Mrs. Ward persuades us that, if such a being never did exist, there is an unoccupied niche in the world of reality which may yet be occupied with a statuesque selfishness like hers. The mixed poverty and passion of her nature, the keenness of her careless observa- tions and the insatiability of her desires, her perfect in- accessibility to anything like sympathy, the grandeur of her beauty, and the still greater grandeur of her fury and despair, her notion of religion as a ceremonial pomp by which the sense of form and colour may be gratified, and some hold over Omnipotence perhaps obtained,—all make up a figure which seems to us unique in English literature, and likely to hold its place as one of the finest conceptions of pure and unadulterated selfishness which was ever endowed with a commanding will. The figure of Elise Delaunay is as far beyond the power of the present writer at least, to verify, as the figure of Louie. But though not so grandiose, it is fully as original. Such inordinate desire for fame as an artist as Elise Delaunay feels, is per- haps more intelligible in a woman to the present generation than it would have been to any previous generation, for more women are now beginning to drink deep of that very be- wildering though very unsustaining draught. But this inordinate desire for fame alone would not be impressive. It is the manner in which it is intertwined with feminine tenderness, with playful humour, with a genuine though shallow passion, with knowledge of the world, with everything attractive except moral purity and religious feeling, of which she does not show a trace, that makes the picture so extraordi- narily vivid. Mrs. Humphry Ward's fault as an artist is a tendency to too heavy a hand. Like her uncle, Matthew Arnold, who in his prose works always leaned too heavily on his leading idea, pressing the " sweetness and light," or the porro unum necessariuns est, or the "three Lord Shaftesburys," till his readers began to rebel against his insistency, Mrs. Ward often leans too heavily on her etching-needle, and brings out lines somewhat too deeply drawn. But it is not so in her picture of Elise Delaunay. The picture is to us a very repulsive one when one comes to consider it as a whole, and is no doubt intended so to be. But it is a marvel of art, —light, airy, delicate, yet real, showing how fine a gauze may be manufactured out of purely worldly material, as well as how worthless that material really is. Take the following, for, instance, where Elise Delaunay finds herself omitted from all notice in some art-criticism, while her rival, and some even of those who could not count as her rivals, are favourably noticed Next morning David went across to the village shop to buy some daily necessaries, and found a few newspapers lying on the counter. He bought a Debate, seeing that there was a long critique of the Salon in it, and hurried home with it to Elise. She tore it open and rushed through the article, putting him aside that he might not look over her. Her face blanched as she read, and at the end she flung the paper from her, and tottering to a chair sat there motionless, staring straight before her. David, beside him- self with alarm, and finding caresses of no avail, took up the paper from the floor. Let it alone ! ' she said to him with a sudden imperious gesture. There is a whole paragraph about Br6a1— her fortune is made. La voila ianae—arrivee ! And of me, not a line, not a mention! Three or four pupils of Taranne—all beginners—but my name—nowhere ! Ali, but no—it is too much I '—Her little foot beat the ground, a hurricane was rising within her.—David tried to laugh the matter off. ' The man who wrote the wretched thing had been hurried—was an idiot, clearly, and what did one man's opinion matter, even if it were paid for at so much a column ?'—"Mais, tais-toi, done I' she cried at last, turning upon him in a fury. Can't you see that everything for an artist—especially a woman—depends on the protections she gets at the beginning ? Bow can a girl—helpless—without friends— make her way by herself ? Some one must hold out a hand, and for me it seems there is no one—no one ! '—The outburst seemed to his common-sense to imply the most grotesque oblivion of her success in the Salon, of Taranne's kindness—the most grotesque sensitiveness to a few casual lines of print. But it wrung his heart to see her agitation, her pale face, the handkerchief she was twisting to shreds in her reetless hands. He came to plead with her—his passion lending him eloquence. Let her but trust her- self and her gift. She had the praise of those she revered to go upon. How should the carelessness of a single critic affect her ? Imbeciles !—they would be all with her, at her feet, some day. Let her despise them then and now ! But his extravagances only made her impatient.—' Nonsense ! ' she said, drawing her hand away from him ; • I am not made of such superfine stuff—I never pretended to be ! Do you think I should be content to be an unknown genius ? Never !—I must have my fame counted out to me in good current coin, that all the world may hear and see. It may be vulgar—I don't care ! it is so. Alt, turn Dim!' and she began to pace the room with wild steps, 'and it is my fault—my fault ! If I were there on the spot, I should be remembered— they would have to reckon with me—I could keep my claim in sight. But I have thrown away everything—wasted everything —everything ! '—He stood with his back to the window, motionless, his hand on the table, stooping a little forward, looking at her with a passion of reproach and misery ; it only angered her; she lost all self-control, and in one mad moment she avenged on his poor heart all the wounds and vexations of her vanity. Why had he ever persuaded her ? Why had he brought her away and hung a fresh burden on her life which she could never bear? Why had he done her this irreparable injury—taken all simplicity and directness of aim from her—weakened her energies at their source ? Her only maims was art, and he had made her desert it ; her only power was the painter's power, and it was crippled, the fresh spring of it was gone. It was because she felt on her the weight of a responsibility, and a claim she was not made for. She was not made for love—for love at least as he understood it. And he had her word, and would hold her to it. It was madness for both of them. It was stifling—killing her I"

And then compare this with the following exquisitely delicate bit of delineation :—

"She was all day alone. When he came back it was already 'evening; the stars shone in the June sky, but the sunset light was still in the street and on the upper windows of the little house. As he opened the garden gate and shut it behind him, he saw the gleam of a lamp behind the acacia, and a light figure beside it. He stood a moment wrestling with himself, for he was wearied out, and felt as if he could bear no more. Then he moved slowly on. Elise was sitting beside the lamp, her head bent over some- thing dark upon her lap. She had not heard the gate open, and she did not hear his steps upon the grass. He came closer, and saw, to his amazement, that she was busy with a coat of his—an old coat, in the sleeve of which he had torn a great rent the day before, while he was dragging her and himself through some underwood in the forest. She—who loathed all womanly arts, who had often boasted to him that she hardly knew how to use a needle ! In moving nearer, he brushed against the shrubs, and she heard him. She turned her head, smiling. In the mingled light she looked like a little white ghost, she was so pale and her eyes so heavy. When she saw him, she raised her finger with a childish, aggrieved air, and put it to her lips, rubbing it softly against them. It does prick so!' she said plaintively.—He came to sit beside her, his chest heaving. Why do you do that—for me P '—She shrugged her shoulders, and worked on without speaking. Presently she laid down her needle and surveyed him. ` Where have you been all day ? Have you eaten nothing, poor friend P—He tried to remember. I think not ; I have been in the forest.'—A little quiver ran over her face ; she pulled at her needle violently and broke the thread. Finished!' she said, throwing down the coat and springing up. 'Don't tell your tailor who did it! I am for perfection in all things-.--d bas l'amateur ! COMO in, it is supper-time past. I will go and hurry Madame Pyat. 2'a dois avoir une fain de loup!—He shook his head, smiling sadly.—'I tell you, you are hungry, you shall be hungry !' she cried, suddenly flinging her arm round his neck, and nestling her fair head against his shoulder. Her voice was half a sob.= Oh, so I am !—so I am !' he said, with a wild em- phasis, and would have caught her to him. But she slipped away and ran before him to the house, turning at the window with the sweetest, frankest gesture to bid him follow."

No one could, in our mind, paint more vividly the finer

workings of a woman's heart torn by contending vanity and tenderness ; and yet the wonderful picture excites in us a certain moral nausea, which no doubt Mrs. Humphry Ward intended to excite.

There is much besides that we have no space to dwell upon, in the fine artistic work of these volumes. Reuben and Hannah Grieve are powerfully sketched. The moor

'country between the Derbyshire Peak and Lancashire is painted with a very powerful though a somewhat heavy hand.

Liao and his wife are very impressive sketches. And the escapade of the children in search of the preternatural is an episode that will live in our literature. But take the art of the book as a whole, and its highest mark is certainly reached in the studies of Louie and of Elise Delaunay.

W hen we come to the miscellaneous matter in the third volume, which is intended to vindicate for The History of

David Grieve, the semi-philosophical, semi-theological char- acter which made the popularity of Robert Elsmere, we cannot

say that we find much to admire,—David Grieve's diaries never really grapple with his subject, and they are apt to be both fragmentary and dull. There is one passage in which Mrs. Humphry Ward touches a central point of theology and philosophy, to which she never again reverts. "What," she makes David Grieve muse, "if the true key to life lay not in knowledge but in will ? What if knowledge in the true sense was utterly impossible to man, and if Christianity not only offered but could give him the one thing truly needful, —his own will regenerate ? " (Vol. III., p. 101.) We need

hardly say that we do not in the least accept the idea that the sphere of knowledge and the sphere of will can possibly be alternatives of which the second ex- cludes the first. But what is most noticeable in The History of David Grieve, is that, taking these two influences only, it is apparently through knowledge, rather than through will, that the development of his nature is supposed to be brought about. His old teacher,

Mr. Ancrum, once speaks to him of the reality of sin, to which he replies :--" Well, I don't know what you mean. One needn't be very old to find out that a good many people and things in the world are pretty bad. Only we Secularists ex- plain it differently from you. We put a good deal of it down to education, or health, or heredity." (Vol. II., p. 133.) And though there is much in his later diaries and musings which suggest a less indifferent attitude of mind towards moral evil, that view is never recanted or repudiated, and we should take it to represent David Grieve's ultimate philosophy as well as his first. Now, since the assumption of laws of Nature which are unalterable and equally uniform alike in the physical and mental, in the divine and human region, hardly admits of free-will at all, those who are always holding up anything like physical supernaturalism to scorn, are bound to tell us why they reject it with so mach contumely. Is it because they believe the universe to be under. adamantine necessity from beginning to end, or only because they think necessity rules in the physical world but not in the moral ? Mrs. Ward ignores this critical question. If man, as well as physical nature, belongs wholly to the field of uniform causation, sin is an impossibility. If he has a real freedom of his own, and under the same conditions can act either this way or that, then the presumption in favour of absolute uniformity of nature, on which Mrs. Humphry Ward's attitude towards anything like miracle seems to depend, is un- tenable, and she is bound to explain that she accepts Dr. Martineau's position that miracle is perfectly conceivable, but that it lacks evidence. To our mind, though she dwells much

more on the latter view than on the former, David Grieve's assumptions appear to be virtually determined by the a priori philosophical objection. At all events, he never evinces any symptom of that attitude towards sin, which Dr. Martineau has insisted on again and again with all the force of his powerful mind.

The remarks scattered through David Grieve's diaries on the modern criticisms of the Gospels appear to us extraordinarily weak, scrappy, and miscellaneous. This is not the way to open up questions which demand coherent treatment like Dr. Mar- tineau's on the one side, or Bishop Lightfoot's on the other, and which are not opened up at all by laboured encomiums on German investigation. Mrs. Ward knows very well that many of the most unfettered of the German critics,—Harnack, for example,—have done a great deal towards breaking down the ultra-sceptical criticism on which she builds so much. Matters of this kind, cannot be effectually treated, even for the purpose of an imaginative picture of an intellectual character, by a method of this sort. We do not understand David Grieve a bit the better, for instance, for an entry like the following in his diary after his wife's death :—

"November 2nd.—It seems to me that last night was the first night since she died that I have not dreamt of her. As a rule, I am always -with her in sleep, and for that reason I am the more covetous of the sleep which comes to me so hardly. It is a second life. Yet before her illness, during our married life, I hardly knew what it was to dream. Two nights ago I thought I was standing beside her. She was lying on the long couch under the sycamore tree whither we used to carry her. At first, everything was wholly lifelike and familiar. Sandy was somewhere near. She had the grey camel's hair shawl over her shoulders, which I remember so well, and the white frilled cap drawn loosely together under her chin, over bandages and dressings, as usual. She asked me to fetch something for her from the house, and I went, full of joy. There seemed to be a strange mixed sense at the bottom of my heart that I had somehow lost her and found her again. When I came back, nurse was there, and everything was changed. Nurse looked at me with meaning, startled eyes, as much as to say, 'Look closely, it is not as you think.' And as I went up to her, lying still and even smiling on her couch, there was an imper- ceptible raising of her little white hand as though to keep me off. Then in a flash I saw that it was not my living Lucy ; that it could only be her spirit. I felt an awful sense of separation and yet of yearning ; sitting down on one of the mossy stones beside her, I wept bitterly, and so woke, bathed in tears It has often seemed to me lately that certain elements in the Resurrection stories may be originally traced to such experiences as these. I am irresistibly drawn to believe that the strange and mystic scene beside the lake, in the appendix chapter to the Gospel of St. John, arose in some such way. There is the same mixture of elements— of the familiar with the ghostly, the trivial with the passionate and exalted—which my own consciousness has so often trembled under in these last visionary months. The well-known lake, the old scene of fishers and fishing-boats, and on the shore the mysterious figure of the Master, the same yet not the same, the little, vivid, dream-like details of the fire of coals, the broiled fish, and bread, the awe and longing of the disciples—it is borne in upon me with extraordinary conviction that the whole of it sprang, to begin with, irom the dream of grief and exhaustion. Then, in an age which attached a peculiar and mystical importance to dreams, the beautiful thrilling fancy. passed from mouth to mouth,

in became almost immediately history stead of dream,—just as here and there a parable misunderstood has taken the garb of an event, —was after a while added to and made more precise in the interest of apologetics, or of doctrine, or of the simple love of elaboration, and so at last found a final resting-place as an epilogue to the fourth GospeL"

If that criticism has any value, it must be because it applies more or less to all the accounts of our Lord's appearances after his resurrection, and not to one of them only. But if that is the assumption, how obvious it is to ask whether David Grieve's whole life, active and passive was in any way affected by this dream ! We know that it was not. Is there, then, the least parallelism between a dream which had no effect whatever except to excite a few tender reflections, and the dreams,—if they could have been dreams, —which changed a flock of shrinking and ignorant cowards into a Church which transformed the world ? The critical school to which Mrs. Humphry Ward belongs seems to us to make this fundamental blunder :—It fixes on a number of small miracles, and, dealing with them as if they stood alone, assails them in detail, often with considerable acuteness, and then proceeds, unconsciously rather than consciously, to infer from these specimens of negative criticism that the much greater miracle of which they are the setting, is a merely human phenomenon, just as if a jeweller, by elaborate criticism of the brilliants in which a pearl of great price was set, thought it sufficient to infer that the pearl itself could not be genuine. It seems to us that if there is, as Mrs. Ward assumes, a reality behind the Gospels, that reality is found in the story of the Crucifixion, in the substantial features of which all accounts agree. To our mind, that story is so full of the supernatural,—though there is no physical miracle in it,— that no one reading it, and judging it by human nature as it is known to the deepest human experience, can regard the person of Christ as human. It seems to Its that the true method to pursue towards the story of the resurrection and the birth of Christ, is to start from the Crucifixion, and ask how that event, taken alone, would have affected the disciples had there been no supernatural element either in the antecedents or the consequents. We hold that it would have left them at once lightning-struck and paralysed,—unable to believe that their Master was a man, still less able to believe that he was God. The lesser wonders which preceded and followed that event, really explain it. Instead of interpreting the greater by the light derived from the less, the true method is to interpret the less by the light derived from the greater. But that is what Mrs. Humphry Ward's school never thinks of doing. Let us add one remark on Mrs. Ward's teaching as to immortality, towards which she evidently intends her hero to assume a hopeful attitude. What, then, does she mean by saying, in the final and most solemn sentence of her book, that after Louie's suicide, she was "freed at last and for ever from that fierce burden of her- self" P We should have supposed that, if immortality means anything, in the spiritual world she would have had a double dose of herself.

This brilliant novel would be all the better for being curtailed of its rather wearisome and ineffectual appendices. For those appendices, if they are to shed any light on the mind of Mrs. Ward's not very clearly distinguishable hero, need a great deal of expansion, and a great many additions which are not supplied.